West Point graduate and Former Army Capt. Jonathan Hopkins was stationed in Fairbanks until last Tuesday when he was discharged under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the military's ban against openly-gay service members.

Hopkins lived in Alaska for several years between combat missions to the Middle East. He was outed early last summer, and continued to work on the base in Fairbanks throughout the investigation. His boyfriend of ten months, Finely Bock, of Ninilchik, Alaska, said the soldiers Hopkins led in Alaska were "very accepting" toward him and his relationship with Hopkins after it was revealed, according to the Seattle Times.

Hopkins, once the fourth-ranking graduate of West Point out of 933 cadets and an officer who led three combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, was kicked out of the Army for being gay. His last day of service was Tuesday in Fairbanks, Alaska. He left behind — grudgingly — nine years of risking his life and training soldiers.

"I love the Army, I've always loved the Army. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent nine years depriving myself of the ability to have happy personal relationships with others," Hopkins said on "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC.

Fourteen months ago, on the same day he learned he was going to be promoted to major a year early, Hopkins was told by his battalion commander that he had been outed for being gay. After years of paranoia — he didn't fully realize he was gay until after graduating from West Point — the fatigue of living a lie had caught up with him.

"It's a job that we risk dying doing, and yet we have to be more scared of somebody realizing we're gay, more paranoid about that, than whether the enemy is going to blow us up," Hopkins said, referring to the more than 14,000 gay people who have been kicked out of the military. "You have to keep that all secret and tell lots of lies."

"It's time for the best, most powerful military in the world to allow gays to serve in the armed forces."

Hopkins and Bock are moving to Washington D.C. where Hopkins will attend graduate school this fall at Georgetown University.

Watch Rachel Maddow interview Captain Jonathan Hopkins about being fired from the U.S. Army under DADT:

3 comments:

It is completely disappointing to see a person of this extraordinary caliber dismissed for being who he is in life! Why aren't hetero's bounced out when they reveal they are married to the opposite gender...something that is who they are in life. It is so very wrong to treat good, capable, intelligent, brave people like this. As an American who is disgusted by all this DADT nonsense, please accept my apologies for those "who know not what they do." I am so very grateful for your sacrifice and dedication to a country which doesn't desrve the good grace of your patriotism.

It's a disgrace for someone who has given so much to his country to be dishonored in this way. The US armed service will not be the"best and most powerful in the world" until the travesty of DADT has ended. What really grinds me, is that our president could have ended it by executive order on day 1. I don't need consensus on this. We will not have consensus on this. DADT needs to be put behind us.